Not Enough Items

Template:ModTemplate:FMNot Enough Items (or NEI for short) is a utility mod made by chicken_bones. It appears whenever the inventory or other GUI that contains an inventory is opened, and allows a user to view crafting recipes and usages of the majority of the items in the FTB mod packs. It can be enabled and disabled with the "O" key by default.

To search for an item, simply type part of the item's name in the search box below the inventory. Once the item is found, to get its recipes, press the "R" key while hovering your mouse over it (or left-click if you are not in cheat mode.) If there are multiple recipes listed, that means that the item in question can be made in those ways. If, in the recipe, some of the items change from time to time (ex. different ingots, circuits, etc.), you can use any one of the changing items in that recipe.To change between different methods of obtaining that item (ex. smelting, crafting, rolling machine, blast furnace), click the left and right arrows at the top of the recipe interface.

Similarly, if a user presses the "U" key while hovering over an item (or right-clicks on the item if not in cheat mode), NEI will show the item's usage (what crafting recipes it is used in). This function works in generally the same way as the recipe function.

If a user is an op on a server (or is playing single-player), they may go into the options at the bottom-left hand corner of the screen and change NEI's mode to "cheat mode", which unlocks all functions of NEI. This mode is mainly used for testing or recuperation of items lost through bugs, as it allows the player to spawn in items, heal themselves, change the weather and time of day, attract items, and delete items. It also allows a player to easily switch through Survival, Creative, and Creative+ gameplay modes. Creative+ is a new gameplay mode added by NEI which functions in exactly the same way as Creative mode, except without tabs and instead with a standard survival inventory and separate additional inventory.

If the search box is double-clicked, it will turn yellow and highlight items in the inventory that fit the search typed inside the box. To turn this off and return to non-highlighting mode, simply double-click again. Right click the search box to clear before searching.

Lesser Known Features

Left click a question mark to show an overlay of the recipe on the GUI.

Shift-left click the question mark in a crafting table, and NEI will autofill the GUI with the recipe using whatever items are in your inventory.

The Creative tabs subset has each creative mode tab in its own subset. (Functionally similar to the Mod subset, but has subsets for vanilla items, extra subsets for some mods, and lacks some mod subsets.)

Left click an empty slot to save the current config.

Left click a saved config to use it.

Right click any slot to rename it.

Left click the X next to a saved config to delete it.

Press Backspace (can be rebound under NEI options>controls) to go back a recipe.

If the item switching in recipes starts giving you a headache, hold shift to stop it. (Item switching meaning the recipe changing once every second with a different type of wood/dye/ore/circuit-chipset-gate.

In the NEI options menu, you can enable highlight tips to see the name of whatever block your selection box is around. (i.e. the block that you would break if you left clicked.)

Right click the output while crafting to pick up as many of the result as you can. (It's like shift clicking, but limited to a stack, and you pick up what you craft instead of having it go straight into your inventory.)

Hold Q and click on an item in an inventory to drop the item on the floor. (Inventory tweaks has the same action bound to the same shortcut.)

Scroll up while hovering over an item in an inventory to effectively shift click one item at a time. (This is so much more amazing than it sounds, and it only gets better.)

Scroll down while hovering over an item in an inventory to fill it with an item from another inventory. (If you have planks in your inventory but need a couple more, just open a chest with planks, hover over the planks in your inventory, and scroll down! Fumbling with left and right clicks is for noobs!)

When you place an item into an inventory, hold shift to move all items of the same type to that inventory. (i.e. left click to pick up item, start holding shift, left click to place item into another inventory. All of that type of item from the first inventory will move into the second one. This doesn't work if you place the item into the same inventory that you took it out of. Inventory Tweaks has a similar function that works better (when it does work; some of the shortcuts are a bit buggy at the moment.), and the newest update of the Mindcrack pack has InvTweaks, so I don't think this is too useful.)

Double click the search bar at the bottom to search inventories as well as the items pane. Yellow searches inventories as well as the items pane on the right, and gray searches only the items pane. With inventory search enabled, all items that don't match the search query are grayed out.

Right click the search bar at the bottom to clear it and select it. (Almost infinitely faster than spamming backspace.)

You can use regex in the NEI search. Except nobody seems to actually know what regex is, never mind how to use it, so that's fantastic.

Under NEI options>NEIPlugins options>Tooltip options, you can enable or disable the fuel tooltips.

Press page up/down (can be rebound) or use the scroll wheel if you're tired of clicking the Next and Previous buttons on the item panel. (The scrolling only works if your cursor is over the item panel.)

In any sort of crafting GUI (including machines), you can left click the arrow/progress bar from the input to the output to view all recipes that use that type of crafting.

Known Issues

Opening the NEI options from a crafting table, then going to the Shortcuts Help screen ("?" button), then pressing escape, will clear out of NEI and not return you to the crafting table screen, and all of the items that had been placed on the crafting table will be destroyed.